Things That Make Me Say Good Gravy!!!! $1.04 Edition

You have to hand it to the guys at Goldman Sachs - they've got their shit figured out. People can moan and complain all they want about fatcat bankers and Main Street vs. Wall Street and class divisions and all the other stuff - but you at least have to agree they've got their shit figured out.

A few years ago Sparks was a fatcat oil man literally swimming in the liquid gold Exxon treasury kept in an Olympic size pool underneath the Belt Parkway in Dallas. As you'll recall Exxon had some monster paydays because they had their shit figured out (or speculators drove the price of oil to irrational levels). Anyway, at the time, I did a little math - breaking profits down in a way that makes them easier to understand. So who wins? The Exxon of the oil bubble, or the Goldman Sachs of right now?
More...
Well, Goldman had 4Q profits of $4,790,000,000.00. Exxon had 2008 4Q profits of 11,680,000,000.00. Exxon wins? Not so fast.

Exxon is HUGE. They have a kabillion employees. They employ all of Texas, most of the middle East, some of Africa, and my little brother from the Delta-Pi chapter of Kappa Sigma. Goldman employs a comparative handful - most of whom are of dubious character (ahem, Shoulders? Le Trois?).

When viewed this way, Goldman wins - earning profits of $134,929.58 per employee for the quarter. Exxon, a paltry $111,556.83.

Now, $134K over a quarter is a little abstract.
So how about $1,499.22 per day?
Or $62.47 per hour?

Or $1.04 per minute? Every minute. Of Every hour, day and night. For every employee. GOOD GRAVY!!!!

Things That Make Me Say Good Gravy!!!

Proving once again why the Wall Street Journal has my favorite sports section, today they report an analysis of what the coverage of a 3+ hour football game is. That is, how much are commercials, crowd shots, replays, reviews, cheerleaders etc. The real surprise for me, however - my GOOD GRAVY moment, was the amount of time players are actually playing. All told, there are about 11 minutes of action in an NFL game. GOOD GRAVY!!!! That's it?!?! Yup.

Consider most players only play on one side of the ball (and even then rarely every snap on offense or defense). All told, if a player stays healthy for 16 weeks, they might be active for just shy of 90 minutes all season. GOOD GRAVY!!!!!

I know it's not apples to apples, but this is about as much action as a rugby player would have in a single game (80 minutes).

I'm usually pretty defensive and dismissive of my English and Australian colleagues when they say American football is just guys standing around, but I guess this puts it in a new light.

Anyway. J - E -T - S jets jets jets

Things That Make Me Say Good Gravy

Sitting here at home, wondering where KillerB2 is, watching Bristol Bay Brawl - basically The Most Dangerous Catch 2.0.

So these guys are fishing for herring, so they can sell the roe to Asian markets. Cool. They drive around the Bay, drop nets, haul fish, cuss, swear, etc.

After they've caught a bunch of fish, they haul it to a processing boat. When they do they get the weight, and value of their catch. Exciting!!!!

So this dude just rolled the dice, got a huge catch. 20 tons of herring. Good Gravy. He's gonna be rich. Sooooooo rich.

Value of 40,000 pounds of herring. $2500. Good Gravy!!!!! Mental note: keep up the high flying marketing, because herring fishing is the ass-end of money making.

Things That Make Me Say Good Gravy: Tiger Edition

I was flabbergasted at Ambien sex. Now we have the additon of sex with 2 pornstars (Holly Sampson and Joslyn James - whoever they are. Some insights X-tian?) and the big one for me - he was banging a pancake cook in his car in a church parking lot. Good Gravy!!!!! Sex in a church parking lot? This dude is messed up. Isn't Florida littered with places you could park a car and have sex? (Some insights T-mo?). I wrote a quiz if any Hosers want to take it.

Places I should not park my car and have sex with a pancake cook:
1) Church
2) Anywhere Else

Things That Make Me Say "Good Gravy"

There is an ad on CNN.com from CSX - the big train / freight company. In their ad, which I trust because I'm a High Flying Marketing Executive, they state that they can "move a ton of freight 436 miles on a single gallon of fuel" - to which I say, "Good Gravy!!!!"

I can barely move my 1/12th of a ton down the street with less than a gallon of beer or a pound of steak in my belly.

Things That Make me Say "Good Gravy!!!!!!"

This is the Manhattan Bridge - I take it back and forth between Manhattan and Brooklyn all the time - but I've never really seen it like this before. Good Gravy!!!!! This bridge is really dancing when those trains come across. Engineers must spend a lot of time crossing their fingers after something is built.

Things That Make You Say "Good Gravy"

Every now and then I come across a fact, a tidbit, a picture, an anecdote that makes me think "Good gravy! Can that possibly be true?" I've had a couple from the natural world lately so I thought I'd share them with Hosers to see if you are equally gobsmacked.

1) In doing some reading for my upcoming trip to the Galapagos (which Evil was very excited about, and convincingly lead me to believe he was also in for the journey, for which I did oodles and oodles of research and haggling with the tour company, only to be dumped and left on my own) I read an interesting fact about tortoises. Back in the day when whalers would stop there, they would collect hundreds of tortoises to hang in the hulls of their ship to have as fresh meat. Turns out a tortoise can live for up to a year, hanging upside down in a sunless ship hull, without food or water. Good gravy!

2) Ants make up 10% of the Earth's biomass - that is 10% of the mass of all living things - plants and animals. Good gravy!